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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Long Live the King!

So the UK now has a new Prime Minister – if one viewed by the world (and most of Britain) as a total – if charming - clownBut this seems to be part of a world-wide trend (eg Italy, US, Ukraine) which has seen celebrities ascend to such heights
Johnson is actually brainer than he lets on – his buffoonery is a carefully cultivated act he has been honing since childhood, when he first realised that it made people laugh and like him. Most men, when appearing on television for example, will comb their hair – Johnson does the opposite, ruffling it to ensure he retains his trademark image of disorganisation…. John Oliver captures this well with this short sequence.
And this extensive article from the LRB places Johnson firmly in the tradition of British satire
Here’s a youtube discussion Boris Johnson took part in a few years back (2016?) with an Oxbridge Professor on the merits of Greeks and Romans - which gives a measure of that bit of the man… 

How did it happen?
Appointed to his position by a curious system created by the Conservative party (some 20 years ago) but used rarely for the appointment of the country’s Prime Minister, Johnson was the clear favourite from the start – but attracted the support of a bare majority of Conservative MPs. And was then subject (along with Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt) to a fortnight of debate within the membership (of 160,000) Conservative party members.
From this he emerged last week with the support of 66% of Conservative party members – and was duly anointed by the Queen on Friday.

What did he then do?
Under the (unwritten) UK constitution, this is enough to allow him to appoint a Cabinet – which he duly did over the weekend. 
It’s been called the most right-wing cabinet ever seen in the UK – and it is certainly one being readied for another election in the autumn – only some 2 years after the last one called by his predecessor Theresa May who had inherited a good majority but lost it in that gamble. 

But Johnson and his government are highly vulnerable to any vote of confidence – a bye-election this week could see the government’s theoretical majority reduced to one! And it is clear that there is no majority in the current Parliament for a no-deal Brexit

So now what? The Institute of Government Think Tank has just published a briefing on the issues which confront him and his government. What is very clear is that Theresa May did her best to keep the UK within the ambit of the EU and that we now have a government which is determined to take the country out of Europe "lock, stock and barrel"!

A Pause for reflection
With my usual serendipity, I had plucked a rather worn-looking book from the library over the same weekend – Timothy Garten Ash’sFacts are Subversive- political writing from a decade without a name” (2010) - one of whose essays bears the title “Is Britain European?”, written in 2001) and is one of the best things I have read on the subject, taking me back to the series of posts I did on British (or English) identity I did earlier in the year……This is one of the last of about a dozen posts on the subject I did then……
Garten Ash’s article has also got a great set of references – including the name of a historian I hadn’t heard of Jeremy Black  who has just produced Britain and Europe – a short history (2019)

A lot of us are looking to historians to help us make sense of this moment in the history of a country about which a lot of us grew up being very ambivalent
As a Scot with a Scottish father and English mother - and educated in a state school - I didn’t absorb much English history so come fairly fresh to the stuff flowing from sophisticated English nationalist academics such as this first part of a series which is presumably being written to put Brexit in "proper" context. Jonathan Storey is a retired History Professor (from the Insead Business School in France) and runs a blog which offers thought-provoking views of the UK and Europe - in posts which are even longer than mine! . 


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